


To Live Without Loving (is not really to live)

by Bronte



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Identity Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:15:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22636597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bronte/pseuds/Bronte
Summary: Chat blinks up at Ladybug, “My Lady, il le faut avouer, l'amour est un grand Maître.”“Ugh,” she groans, running her gloved hand over her face as her Miraculous begins to beep at her, “If you’re well enough to recite love poems to me, then you’re well enough to get up.”A LadyNoir story.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 15
Kudos: 244
Collections: THEME:  Seine





	To Live Without Loving (is not really to live)

> _ Et vivre sans aimer n'est pas proprement vivre. - Molière _

“Marinette!”

With a start, Marinette shoves her mobile phone beneath her pillow and grabs the novel beside her, opening it at random,  _ “Oui, Maman?” _

“It’s nearly 23:00,” Sabine announces, hoisting the apartment's trapdoor open and peeking inside, “Why are your lights still on?”

Marinette grimaces, “I have to finish this book by tomorrow and I’m still not done!”

Raising an eyebrow, Sabine climbs up the steps and gently pads towards Marinette’s bedside, “You’ve been at it for hours and you’re telling me that you’re still not finished?”

Marinette knows a lost cause when she sees one, “I may have gotten…distracted.”

“Hmm,” Sabine crosses her arms across her chest, “You have ten minutes, then it’s lights out.”

“But  _ Maman _ …”

“Hush. Your _ brevet _ is coming up soon and I expect you to excel, as you always do. You need your sleep.”

Marinette groans, “ _Oui,_ _Maman_.”

“ _ Doux rêves, mon coeur _ .”

Marinette returns the sentiment and watches as Sabine closes the trapdoor behind her. She listens, holding her breath as her mother’s footsteps carry down the stairs, leading into the bedroom. After a moment or two of quiet chatter, her parent’s bedroom door opens and squeaks shut with a click.

“Finally.” Exhaling, Marinette snatches her vibrating phone out from under her pillow and slides her thumb against it, illuminating the screen. An image of the infamous cabaret  _ Le Chat Noir _ casts a shadow across her bedroom, “Allo?”

_ “M’Lady! I thought you had fallen asleep on me.” _

Marinette rolls her eyes, “I got distracted.”

_ “Not distracted enough to leave me hanging, are you?” _

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

_ “Until then, mon amour.” _

Quickly, Marinette taps the end call button against her fingertips and slips from beneath her covers, eager to sneak out before it gets too late in the evening. She tugs on a pair of pyjama pants and crawls outside, crossing over to the potted plants hanging from the wrought iron railings enclosing her balcony.

“Ready to go?” Tikki asks, rising from the fronds. Marinette nods and fastens the zip of her sweater before allowing Tikki to merge with her Miraculous, bathing the balcony in scarlet light. Mask safely affixed to her skin, she slips out into the evening breeze and leaps across the rooftops, eventually plopping down onto their favourite meeting spot along the city-spanning river, the Seine.

“ _ Bonsoir, ma chérie _ !”

Ladybug turns towards the source of the racket as Chat Noir drops onto the quai from above, landing in a crouch beside her. The lattice of the bench she’s sitting on trembles as he digs his claws into the metal, steadying his balance, “Hey Chat. How’s my favourite stray?”

Chat spreads his arms dramatically,  _ “La vie est belle!” _

“You seem like you’re in a good mood,” Ladybug smiles, relaxing against the backrest.

“My day improves exponentially each time I get to see you.”

“Really?” Ladybug is pretty sure that if she rolled her eyes any harder, they might just get stuck there, “It’s been, what, two days since we last crossed paths?”

“An eternity,” Chat replies, holding his hand over his chest, “It wounds me to be so close, and yet so far.”

Ladybug can’t help but snort, “I can’t say that I’ve missed your melodrama.”

“Forgive me M’Lady, but I’ve been forced into reading Molière for the past week and I feel it may be rubbing off on me.”

Ladybug hesitates before responding, having just left  _ L'École des femmes _ sitting on her duvet not twenty minutes ago, “Let’s just get down to business, shall we?”

Chat smiles and opens his palm to the horizon,  _ “Après vous.” _

~

“Chat!”

Ladybug screeches to a halt and uses her momentum to launch herself against the buildings lining the boulevard, pulling a hard 180° turn. She flings her yoyo and it wraps around the base of a satellite dish, sending her flying back to Chat’s location, “Are you okay?!”

He’s lying in the base of a crater, the akuma having body slammed him into the concrete, “Never better!”

Ladybug drags her eyes from Chat’s prone body and focuses on the akuma instead. Its body is huge, not unlike the rock monster they encountered on their very first adventure together. However, this particular akuma is far more calculating and intelligent that she had initially assumed.

“Hey! Bonehead!” Ladybug hollers to distract the monster from squashing Chat again. She can tell from his wheezing that whatever the akuma did to him while she wasn’t looking, he would need a minute or two to recuperate, “Look over here!”

Using her yoyo, Ladybug swings back and forth, drawing the hulking mass of a monster towards her. She reaches the other side of the boulevard and runs down the length of it, leaping off of a bench and vaulting back up into the sky. The akuma lumbers towards her, its hands flailing wildly in her general direction, and Ladybug does all that she can to keep one eye on potential tools for a plan and the other on Chat.

“Alright akuma,” she mutters, “Let’s get this over with.”

Ladybug raises her hand above her head with a flourish, summoning her Lucky Charm. It’s a sledge and it doesn’t take long for her to figure out what to do with it. With the help of her yoyo, a cement truck parked up the way, a tandem bicycle and a clothesline, Ladybug effectively smashes the monster to bits and releases the black akuma hiding inside its abdomen. Ladybug reaches up to capture it, purifying its soul, and releases it to the mercy of the winds.

“Bravo!”

Ladybug is already halfway over when Chat starts pulling himself out of his Chat sized crater. He droops over the chunks of concrete, wincing when the hole corrects itself under Ladybug’s restorative magic, and rolls over onto his back instead.

“Are you alright?”

Chat blinks up at Ladybug, “My Lady,  _ il le faut avouer, l'amour est un grand Maître _ .”

“Ugh,” she groans, running her gloved hand over her face as her Miraculous begins to beep at her, “If you’re well enough to recite love poems to me, then you’re well enough to get up.”

She offers him her hand and he takes it, brushing himself off as she hauls him up easily, “Excuse me for being well versed in the classics, M’Lady. I am a cultured cat.”

“You have a test tomorrow on Molière, don’t you?”

Caught, Chat glares at her sidelong, “It’s an in-class essay, I’ll have you know.”

“Well, don’t let me  _ Horace _ you any longer.”

Chat gapes at her suddenly, his eyes wide, “Did you…did you just…?”

“Make a pun? Maybe, maybe not,” she smirks, batting him on the nose, “Now, it’s time to get going. You need your beauty sleep.”

“But—”

“Off with you,” she grins, gesturing at him to leave with a flick of her wrist,  _ “À plus!” _

~

It isn’t a particularly long walk to school the next morning, but Marinette spends most of it thinking about her in-class essay. It’s one of the very last assignments that will count towards her  _ brevet _ at the end of the year; it’s also the third time since the beginning of the semester that Chat has mentioned having to work on a school assignment.

The  _ same _ school assignment as her. 

It’s been niggling at her thoughts for some time now, the fact that Chat may very well be a student in her grade. First, it was the same unit test in maths that had come up in their conversation and between the binomials and trinomials clogging her brain, Marinette hadn’t thought anything of it. But a few months later, it happened again and Chat was waxing poetic about a particular stream of science and the experiment he was completing in class…

...which was the exact same experiment that had blown up in her face that afternoon. 

Armed with the sheer determination to ignore any and all comparisons between her life and his, Marinette stuck her head in the proverbial sand and promptly tuned him out whenever school came up in their conversations. That is, until last night.

Marinette tugs at her ponytails and racks her brain for clues. There are only two 3ème classes in Collège Françoise Dupont and she shares her age with only five other blond boys, one of which is shorter than her. There’s the twins in Mlle Mendeleiev’s class, but they both have much bigger noses than Chat. Then there’s Christien, and that would be impossible given his fairly distinctive Belgian accent which leaves the only other option as…

...Adrien Agreste.

She watches him duck into his locker from the other side of the room and wince as he holds his ribs gingerly, grimacing at another one of Nino’s terrible dad jokes. He’s quoting Molière again, favouring his left arm as he waves it around theatrically, making Nino roll his eyes in response.

_ Oh. _

When she sits down, lined paper in hand and essay prompt at the top, she’s never been so sure of something in her life.

She’s going to fail this essay spectacularly.

And, Adrien Agreste is Chat Noir.


End file.
